Finding information

Why do you read? Reading has many purposes. We often have opportunities to model for our children reading for pleasure and for information. It is wonderful to see our children start to pick up books for fun. It is all the more exciting when they pick up books to find information.

There are innumerable ways we rely on reading for information. Looking up a new bug or finding a favorite recipe are examples. In our testing this week, there was a section about using resources like an atlas, dictionary, or index to search for desired information. Thankfully our family enjoys hunting for information, so this was a fairly easy section. As a side note, there was sure a lot of reading in the test, even in the math section.

My five-year-old confirmed again today that we start practicing information gathering skills from an early age at our house. She was doing an activity in her princess magazine. It was a list of four true and false questions. She brought it to me completed, proudly telling me she got all the answers right! I was in awe! The sentences were complicated and, while she has been surprising me with her rapidly growing reading proficiency, I couldn't believe she had actually read them! Then she confessed, "I didn't read them. I just circled random answers and then checked in the back. And I got them all right!" Way to use your resources, girl!